Film Review: The Bikeriders

Towards the end of Jeff Nichols’s The Bikeriders, aging gang leader Johnny is struck by a sudden moment of introspection: “You can give everything you got to a thing,” he says, “and it’s still just gonna do what it’s gonna do.” What began for him as a harmless search for belonging has now become something else entirely, and hastens the gangs’ steady descent into violence and anarchy.

Inspired by Danny Lyon’s 1967 photobook of the same name, The Bikeriders follows Johnny, played here by Tom Hardy, as he struggles to come to terms with the rapid rise of his midwestern biker gang, the Chicago Vandals. Jodie Comer stars as Kathy, who, after falling in love with Johnny’s would-be successor, Benny (Austin Butler), ends up witnessing the gang’s trials and tribulations for the better part of decade. Over the years, Kathy narrates the gang’s history to Lyons (Challengers’ Mike Faist) through a series of retrospective vignettes. 

The film is driven less by any single narrative, however, and more by a stellar cast of characters. Despite their hardened appearances, these men are really just lost boys—social outcasts and army rejects—who, longing for the solidity of a stable community, but alienated by the ordering principles of American life, have worked to create their own rules-based order. 

Many of the gang’s founding members are open about the earnest enthusiasm bubbling away beneath the denim, leather, and grease: mechanic Cal’s love of motorcycles culminates at times in a pedantic attention to detail, whilst the simple but kind-hearted Cockroach sees his time with the gang as a stepping stone between his childhood fantasy of being a barbarian and his dream of becoming a motorcycle cop. Even Johnny, the toughest of the lot, has self-consciously styled himself after Marlon Brando in The Wild One; his ‘Bugs Bunny’ twang serving as a humorous inversion of Brando’s southern drawl. The exception here is Benny, who is so wrapped up in his own image that he often seems unaware of the insecurities festering behind his biker façade.  

By affectionately picking apart the playful posturing of these characters, the film wryly deconstructs the gangs’ machismo, offering a tender look at their distorted sense of camaraderie and kinship. The result is a tale of brotherly love woven from the damaged threads of the characters’ fragile egos. 

The problem, however, is that the gangs’ soft-side does not carry over in their self-projected image as hard nosed bikers: as new chapters begin to spring up across the Midwest, the gang starts to attract new members whose values are often at odds with those of its founding members. It is here that Kathy’s outsider perspective becomes crucial to understanding the gang’s rapidly changing dynamic. Not only does her concern for Benny see her worrying over the sudden uptick in violence, but, as a woman amongst men, she is all too aware of the real danger posed by the arrival of these strangers. 

Other potential aspects of the gang’s identity politics are largely ignored, however. A brief shot of a Black biker gang hints at the changing political landscape during and in the immediate aftermath of the civil rights movement, but the film does not explore the impact of this movement on its almost all-white gang. Similarly, aside for the brief moment of intimacy between Johnny and Benny and a wry quip from Kathy ("I’m his wife,’ not you"), the film does not interrogate the obvious affinities between its stylized depictions of masculinity and the growing prevalence of queer countercultures, for whom the leather-clad biker was something of a sex symbol. 

The result (and one suspects this is very much the film’s intention) is a nascent feeling of isolation—a sense that the gang is already lost in time. In stark contrast to the implied speed and velocity of their beloved motorbikes, it is impossible to shake the feeling that these characters are going nowhere. Unable to make sense of their place in this changing American landscape, the film offers an honest if affectionate examination of the white male ego as it reckons with its own self-imposed limitations. It is this sense of burgeoning self-awareness, coupled with the superb performances of the cast, that transforms this picture from brooding melodrama into something altogether more profound.   

The Bikeriders is now showing at Broadway cinema